Culture

Alan Cooper Credit Mike Switzer/SC Public Radio An update of the news, events and issues that are trending right now across South Carolina's business community. Mike Switzer interviews Alan Cooper, founder and editor of three online business news websites in South Carolina: MidlandsBiz , UpstateBizSC , and LowCountryBizSC . Disclaimer: Alan Cooper’s company has a business relationship with Voterheads.com, a wholly-owned company of Magnolia Media, which is the producer of the South Carolina Business Review.

Rock Hill’s shiny new Sports & Event Center was all set to be a big deal. It was just slated to open at a colossally unfortunate time – March, 2020. To be fair, it did open, briefly. There was a soft launch; a few events happened. But the city’s newest economic driver, a facility humming with revenue-raking sports and contests, ringed by businesses and restaurants poised to make a killing, never got its hoopla-launch. COVID-19 shut the center’s doors for two months, before it even had a chance to prop them open. Roll the clock forward to July and the city reopened the site for some...

Laura is not expected to produce anywhere near the widespread damage over the Palmetto State that it did over Louisiana, but gusty showers and thunderstorms are likely over parts of the state on Saturday. Laura had weakened to a tropical depression as it moved through Arkansas early Friday morning. Its remnant low is on track to move through Kentucky Friday night into Saturday morning before moving off the Mid Atlantic coast on Sunday. As Laura’s remnant makes it closest approach to South Carolina on Saturday, the winds in the lower part of the atmosphere will increase and are likely to be as...

Friday, August 28 , is the 57th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream Speech." On this anniversary, NPR will offer on-line coverage of the Rev. Al Sharpton's "Get Your Knee Off Our Necks" march, a name generated from his eulogy at the funeral of slain civilian George Floyd. His death at the hands of police drew people from all over the world into the streets, protesting police brutality. Friday, those expecting to attend the march include attorney Benjamin Crump, the families of George Floyd, Beronna Taylor, Eric Garner and...

President Trump is accepting the Republican nomination for president on Thursday. NPR reporters are providing analysis of his remarks live. Loading...

Laura's devastating winds are expected to weaken as it moves northeastward across the Mid-South late this week, but it's likely to alter the wind pattern enough to bring a chance of stronger storms to parts of the state on Saturday. Laura made landfall at 1 AM CT (2 AM ET) near Cameron in southwestern Louisiana, a town about 30 miles from Lake Charles, LA; 105 miles from Galveston; and 190 miles west of New Orleans. Based on preliminary data, Laura's 150 mph maximum sustained winds at the time of landfall made it the strongest hurricane in the historical record to directly strike the state of...

A lot of people see frontline healthcare workers as heroes in the coronavirus pandemic. That might actually be kind of a problem. “You hear about them being superheroes, and that’s nice, but they are people,” says Pamela Wright, an ER nurse and researcher at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. “They do need a helping hand from time to time. They do need someone not just to say, ‘You’re a superhero' and then ignore them. They do need interaction, they do need people.” Wright is talking about the mental and emotional toll that being on the frontlines of a pandemic can take on...

Update as of 11:30 AM: Laura has strengthened further and has top sustained winds of 125 mph as of the 11 AM ET / 10 AM CT advisory from the National Hurricane Center. A surge of 15 to 20 feet is possible over parts of southwest Louisiana, and the surge could extend as far as 30 miles inland in places in southwest Louisiana. Original story as of 8:15 AM: Laura rapidly intensified Tuesday night and has now become the season’s first major hurricane — defined as a category 3 or higher storm. As of the mid-morning Wednesday update from The National Hurricane Center, top sustained winds increased...

Cheedy Jaja grew up in Sierra Leone. He came to the United States to study medicine and became a nurse practitioner. So it’s not much of a stretch to see what drew him back to Sierra Leone when the Ebola crisis broke out in 2014. He felt a call to go home and help. He wasn’t prepared for the things he saw. What Jaja took from his time as a frontline clinician during last decade’s Ebola crisis is startlingly translatable to what’s happening with COVID-19’s frontline workers – the frustrations, the sense of dread, the worry among healthcare workers about how effectively they are doing their...

Susan Pringle Frost was born to a prominent Charleston family and seemed destined for a life of leisure until her father's fertilizer business fell apart after the Civil War. She left boarding school to help her family, first by working as a secretary for an architect and then as a stenographer for the U.S. District Court. "It seems presumptuous to say I understand Miss Sue, but I sort of get some things about her and I just admire her deeply," says Betsy Kirkland Cahill. Cahill is the great-great granddaughter of one of the judges Frost worked for. She learned about the South Carolina...